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Summary.
It was mid-summer 2020, and Ginni Rometty, the chairman and CEO of IBM, had six months remaining on her nearly 40-year career with the company. Her longtime mentor, the revered former CEO of IBM, Lou Gerstner, had reached out to request a meeting. “He wanted to see how my retirement planning was coming along. Truth be told, I hadn’t begun to think about it. I was still running the company full time and had not been able to set aside the time,” Rometty told us.